In 2025, the Message to Man International Film Festival marks its 35th anniversary with a vibrant programme of film showings and cultural events, held in St. Petersburg from October 17 to 25. Alongside its competition screenings, the anniversary lineup will include 11 special sections, ranging from archival treasures to cutting-edge contemporary works.
These curated selections invite viewers on a journey through auteur documentary, live-action, and experimental cinema, showcasing 96 films from over 40 countries.
The Festival is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, the Presidential Foundation for Cultural Initiatives, and the St. Petersburg Committee for Culture.
TEN: GRAND PRIX THROUGH THE DECADES
Winning films from past editions of Message to Man
PANORAMA.DOC
Season’s top documentary films
TWIN PEAKS
New hits from world’s leading festivals
NEW VOICES
Films by directors seeking new forms
IN BETWEEN: ST. PETERSBURG’S FILM CULTURE OF THE 1990s
Works straight from the turbulent era of a new world’s formation
ART DECO: THE ART OF BEING LOUD
Programme marking the centenary of a style that permeated the entire 20th century
GROTESQUE AS A RESPONSE
Excess and absurdity in the cinema of the new twenties
MAPPING PARIS: NEW FRENCH CINEMA
Starring the legendary city of Old Europe
MULTIVERSE
Out-of-competition short film section featuring the best entries not included in the competition
YOUNG RUSSIAN CINEMA: PRESENT CONTINUOUS
The new youth of Russian cinema
OUT OF AUTOFOCUS: FILMS BY MIKHAIL BASOVThe first St. Petersburg retrospective of the world-famous artist.
TEN: GRAND PRIX THROUGH THE DECADES
Curators: Mikhail Zheleznikov, Mikhail Ratgauz, Alena Solntseva, and Vasily Stepanov
“For the 35th anniversary, the Message to Man programmers sought to bring back to the screens the gold unearthed by our colleagues over these three and a half decades. Our approach was simple: we leaned over the well of time, looked only at the water’s surface—the Grand Prix-winning films—and brought back to light the most precious works that have not lost their brilliance.
When you attend the screenings, you will encounter several films that have become classics of documentary and animation. Yet you will also meet the very nature of time, see how the conditional and the absolute have shifted places, and appreciate how the method of closely observing reality has evolved over these decades,” — Mikhail Ratgauz, programme curator.
The section includes treasures of Russian documentary filmmaking, such as Victor Kossakovsky’s The Belovs and Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Bread Day; masterpieces of Russian animation, including Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s Lion with a Grey Beard and Aleksandr Petrov’s My Love; and exemplary works of diverse documentary techniques, such as Carmen Meets Borat by Mercedes Stalenhoef and A Woman Captured by Bernadett Tuza-Ritter.
Films:
- Will My Parents Come to See Me?, 2022, Mo Harawe (Austria, Germany, Somalia);
- The Belovs, 1992, Victor Kossakovsky (Russia);
- Harmony, 2017, Lidia Sheinin (Russia);
- Depth Two, 2016, Ognjen Glavonić (Serbia, France);
- Carmen Meets Borat, 2008, Mercedes Stalehhoef (Netherlands);
- Lion With a Grey Beard, 1994, Andrey Khrzhanovskiy (Russia);
- My Love, 2006, Aleksandr Petrov (Russia);
- A Woman Captured, 2017, Bernadett Tuza-Ritter (Hungary, Germany);
- Fata Morgana, 2005, Anastasia Lapsui, Markku Lehmuskallio (Finland);
- Bread Day, 1998, Sergei Dvortsevoy (Russia).
PANORAMA.DOC
Curated by: Natalia Pylaeva, Ivan Labutin
“In 2025, the Panorama.Doc section includes five films about the will to freedom, forms of escapism, stoic resistance to life’s pressures, and the dynamics of personal and social change. Among them are ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,’ a documentary political thriller about Congo’s decolonization, and ‘Lumière! The Adventure Continues’, a tribute to the pioneers of cinema from the Director of the Cannes Film Festival,” — Natalia Pylaeva and Ivan Labutin, programme curators.
Films:
- Adrianne & the Castle, 2024, Shannon Walsh (Canada);
- Balomania, 2024, Sissel Morell Dargis (Denmark, Spain);
- Lumiere! The Adventure Continues, 2025, Thierry Frémaux (France);
- Imago, 2025, Déni Oumar Pitsaev (France, Belgium);
- Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, 2024, Johan Grimonprez (Belgium, France, Netherlands).
TWIN PEAKS
The Twin Peaks programme borrows its name from David Lynch’s cult classic and its concept of shifted reality. This is theme echoed in the works of globally renowned directors featured in this section. The complex interplay of reality and myth in an authoritarian society is explored in It Was Just an Accident, this year’s Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or winner directed by Jafar Panahi. Memories and fantasies resembling hallucinations shift into a play of colour in the vibrant Resurrection by rising star Bi Gan and the black-and-white Nouvelle Vague by American indie legend Richard Linklater. In Mirrors No. 3 by Christian Petzold, a leader of the Berlin School, the pain of loss drives characters to project images of the deceased onto the random living.
Films:
- Resurrection, 2025, Bi Gan (China, France);
- Nouvelle Vague, 2025, Richard Linklater (France, USA);
- Mirrors No. 3, 2025, Christian Petzold (Germany);
- It Was Just an Accident, 2025, Jafar Panahi (Iran, France, Luxembourg).
NEW VOICES
Curated by: Mikhail Ratgauz
“The New Voices programme was once conceived as a tribute to youth, where nothing is yet settled and everything yearns to be reimagined. Each year, its curator set out in search of dazzling aesthetic novelty, only to encounter a dense wall of familiar variations.
Over time, the old, naive plan became less significant. Now, musicality is the guiding principle; the section is like a complex scale, seeking its own modest harmony rather than checking directors’ ages,” — Mikhail Ratgauz, programme curator.
The programme features Christine Haroutounian’s debut After Dreaming, produced by Carlos Reygadas; The Lake by Fabrice Aragno, the directorial debut of the cinematographer and longtime Godard collaborator; one of last year’s biggest hits among cinephiles, Wind of Fire by Marta Mateus; Rewind & Play, a film about Thelonious Monk by Berlinale winner Alain Gomis; and Bird of Passage by Ivan Kurbakov, the first work by a Russian filmmaker in the history of this special section.
The programme is supported by the Swiss Embassy in Russia.
Films:
- Alpha., 2024, Jan-Willem van Ewijk (Netherlands);
- Matt and Mara, 2024, Kazik Radwanski (Canada);
- Wind of Fire, 2024, Marta Mateus (Portugal, Switzerland, France);
- The Lake, 2025, Fabrice Aragno (Switzerland);
- Bird of Passage, 2025, Ivan Kurbakov (Russia);
- Rewind & Play, 2022, Alain Gomis (France, Germany);
- After Dreaming, 2025, Christine Haroutounian (Armenia, USA, Mexico).
IN BETWEEN: ST. PETERSBURG’S FILM CULTURE OF THE 1990s
Curated by: Egor Sennikov
“St. Petersburg in the 1990s is not only about films but also a cinematic archive of the city’s inner state, suspended between memory and chaos. The films of this decade sought grand allegories. Alexei Uchitel’s ‘Obvodny Canal’ captured the fragile coexistence of madness and art; Sergei Selyanov’s ‘Whit Monday’ explored new forms of metaphysical storytelling; Sergei Vinokurov’s ‘Upyr’ blended genre horror with the reality of the post-Soviet city; and Alexander Bashirov’s ‘The Iron Heel of Oligarchy’ transformed St. Petersburg into a theatrical stage for revolutionary utopia. Short films reflected the same anxieties: elusive states of the in-between, clashes between past and future, between what is no longer there and what is yet to come. Questions of the city’s soul, the boundary between eras, emptiness, and hope resonated at every level, from grand, epic forms to intimate, almost diaristic experiments,” — Egor Sennikov, programme curator.
Films:
- Sunrise, 1993, Timur Novikov, Sergey Shutov (Russia);
- Group Portrait of Loneliness, 1993, Eduard Shelganov (Russia);
- Rains in the Ocean, 1994, Victor Aristov, Yuri Mamin (Russia);
- Whit Monday, 1990, Sergey Selyanov (USSR);
- MITKI IN EUROПE YOLLY-PALLY, 1990, Aleksey Uchitel (USSR, Belgium);
- The Iron Heel of Oligarchy, 1997, Aleksandr Bashirov (Russia);
- Zhuk-1, 1995, Dimitri Lurie (Russia);
- The End of St. Petersburg, or New Icarus, 1992, Eduard Shelganov (Russia);
- Concert for a Rat, 1995, Oleg Kovalov (Russia);
- Neo-academicism Manifesto, 1998, Olga Tobreluts (Russia);
- Above the Lake, 1995, Dmitry Frolov (Russia);
- Nicotine, 1993, Yevgeny Ivanov (Russia);
- Obvodny Canal, 1990, Alexey Uchitel (USSR);
- Penguins, 1993, Timur Novikov, Sergey Shutov (Russia);
- Submarine, 1993, Timur Novikov, Sergey Shutov (Russia);
- The Aftertaste, 1999, Dimitri Lurie (Russia);
- Phantoms of White Nights, 1991, Dmitry Frolov (USSR);
- Emptiness, 1996, Dimitri Lurie (Russia);
- Airplane, 1993, Timur Novikov, Sergey Shutov (Russia);
- Upyr, 1997, Sergey Vinokurov (Russia).
ART DECO: THE ART OF BEING LOUD
Curated by: Maxim Seleznev
“The Art Deco style was first named at the 1925 Paris Exhibition of Decorative Arts and now celebrates its centenary. We invite audiences to explore its history through the lens of cinema, which swiftly embraced Art Deco’s ideas, weaving them into its visual language.
The programme is divided into two chapters: the first explores the peak of screen Art Deco, spotlighting style icon Greta Garbo, Marcel L’Herbier’s lavish experiments, and the style’s integration into classic Hollywood films of the 1930s. The second part examines Art Deco’s return in the 1970s and 1980s, now in a ghostly, fragile, and anxious form, seen in Fassbinder’s family thriller or Alain Resnais’ cool melodrama.
Art Deco is a collection of contradictions, blending elegance with excess, experimental impulses with conformity, and festive exuberance with a distinct premonition of catastrophe. This section, ‘Art Deco: The Art of Being Loud,’ becomes a small gallery of such sparkling anomalies, a collection of strange occurrences. Each film is not only a striking visualization of Art Deco’s characteristic elements but also an emotional paradox, a union of conflicting feelings. Seven screenings form a fragmented alphabet of emotions ignited in Art Deco spaces: from the experimental allure of ‘L’inhumaine’ to the Hollywood melodrama of ‘The Women’, from the searing chill of ‘Chinese Roulette’ to the nostalgia of ‘E.1027’,” — Maxim Seleznev, programme curator.
The programme was developed with the support of Institut Français de Russie and the Swiss Embassy in Russia.
Films:
- E.1027: Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea, 2024, Beatrice Minger, Christophe Schaub (Switzerland);
- L’inhumaine, 1924, Marcel L’Herbier (France);
- The Women, 1939, George Cukor (USA);
- Chinese Roulette, 1976, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Germany, France);
- Mélo, 1986, Alain Rene (France) ;
- La Paloma, 1974, Daniel Schmid (Switzerland, France);
- The Kiss, 1929, Jacques Feyder (USA).
GROTESQUE AS A RESPONSE
Curated by: Katerina Beloglazova
“The ‘Grotesque as a Response’ programme explores how cinema of the past five years responds to the contradictions and conflicts of modernity, finding aesthetic equivalents in normalized absurdity, surrealism, and critically charged eccentricity. The turbulent new ‘20s brought a categorical shift: reality has compromised itself, demanding an entirely new method to address it. Grotesque has replaced sluggishness and verisimilitude. Through genre deviations and fearless invention, it has unearthed truth in its rawest form. Whether it’s a fiery manifesto of living by one’s own rules amidst radical inequality in ‘A Bright Future’ by Lucía Garibaldi, a macabre animated allegory in ‘Birds Whose Legs Break Off’ by Dirk Verschure, a search for vitality in the barren abstraction of capital in ‘100 000 000 000 000’ by Virgil Vernier, or an intellectual multi-genre parable in ‘Kafka for Kids’ by Roee Rosen, the grotesque, in the mid-2020s, has become the shortest path between society’s pressure points, resonating with modernity like nothing else. This section invites a close examination of this new cinematic response to our times,” — Katerina Beloglazova, programme curator.
Films:
- 100 000 000 000 000, 2024, Virgil Vernier (France);
- Flatality, 2021, Mikhail Maximov (Russia);
- Kafka for Kids, 2022, Roi Rosen (Israel);
- Birds Whose Legs Break Off, 2022, Dirk Verschure (Netherlands);
- A Bright Future, 2025, Lucía Garibaldi (Uruguay, Argentina, Germany);
- Undergods, 2020, Chino Moya (United Kingdom, Belgium, Estonia, Serbia, Sweden).
MAPPING PARIS: NEW FRENCH CINEMA
Curated by: Alisa Nasrtdinova
“The section ‘Mapping Paris: New French Cinema’ unites three films where the urban landscape serves not only as a setting but also as a space of political and bodily engagement, collective and personal memory. In ‘Age of Panic’ (‘La Bataille de Solférino’), Justine Triet captures the tension arising on the streets of Paris during a presidential election, where the personal and political intersect. In ‘We’ (‘Nous’), Alice Diop portrays the inhabitants of Paris and its suburbs, connected by a single railway line, shared memory, and subtle personal ties. ‘Paris Memories’ (‘Revoir Paris’) by Alice Winocour explores the intimate experience of post-traumatic recovery in a city marked by a terrorist attack. The female perspective, represented through vibrant figures of new French cinema, remains acutely attuned to bodily and affective experiences—those on the periphery of the metanarratives each film engages with,” — Alisa Nasrtdinova, programme curator.
The programme is supported by Institut Français de Russie.
Films:
- Age of Panic, 2012, Justine Triet (France);
- Paris Memories, 2022, Alice Winocour (France);
- We, 2021, Alice Diop (France).
MULTIVERSE
Curated by: Katerina Beloglazova, Maria Gotlib, Diana Abu Youssef, Vasily Stepanov
Multiverse is a traditional out-of-competition programme of short films that, for various reasons, did not enter the Festival’s International Competition, yet remain too compelling to overlook.
“This year, we selected films bearing traces of the contradictions that simultaneously tear apart and shape the individual of our era. The three ‘Multiverse’ screenings form an anthropological trilogy. The first part explores the notion of ‘home’ as a vessel for personal and collective memory. The second addresses sociality—the roles and functions imposed on individuals by society. The final screening elevates these reflections to a humanitarian and philosophical level, examining the social and technological conditions of human existence in the present and future. Among the notable heroes of this year’s ‘Multiverse’ are Jean-Luc Godard in ‘Rolle Workshop, a Journey,’ actor Michael Madsen in one of his final roles in ‘The Things We Carry’, and British avant-garde legend John Smith in ‘Being John Smith’,” — Katerina Beloglazova, programme curator.
Films:
- Sixty-seven Milliseconds, 2025, fleuryfontaine (France);
- A., 2025, Ramon Balcells (Spain);
- Being John Smith, 2024, John Smith (UK);
- Nine Times Better, 2025, Lorenzo Follari, Emma Dock (Sweden);
- I Remember My Mom, 2025, Leandro Afonso (Brazil);
- Day After Day, 2025, Florence Pazzottu (France);
- The Canon, 2024, Martín Seeger (Chile);
- Who Was Here?, 2025, Evi Stamou (Greece);
- Lamento, 2024, Jannik Giger, Demian Wohler (Switzerland);
- Rolle Workshop, a Journey, 2025, Fabrice Aragno, Jean-Paul Battaggia (Switzerland);
- Ready to Die, 2024, Basilio Maritano Sailer (Germany, Italy);
- We Will Not Be the Last of Our Kind, 2024, Mili Pecherer (France);
- Upon Sunrise, 2025, Stefan Ivančić (Serbia, Spain, Slovenia);
- The Things We Carry, 2025, Thibaud Goarin (USA);
- To Leave a House, 2024, Maïa Dennehy (France);
- Euclidean Man, 2025, Sebastián Pappalardo (Netherlands).
YOUNG RUSSIAN CINEMA: PRESENT CONTINUOUS
Curated by: Katerina Beloglazova, Maria Gotlib, Diana Abu Youssef, Pavel Pugachev, Alena Solntseva, Vasily Stepanov
For the third consecutive year, the Message to Man Festival seeks out compelling short films by young Russian filmmakers, bringing them together several screenings. The selection process is straightforward: one session is curated by the International Competition team, the other by their National Competition colleagues.
“This is truly ‘young’ cinema—debuts, student works, often noticeably raw yet ambitious, promising, gripping its audience, and surprising. The ‘Young Russian’ section opens new names to those who live in our cinema’s present and wish to have an optimistic look toward its future,” — Vasily Stepanov, programme curator from the International Competition.
“We’ve included five vibrant, distinctive works about the hidden dimensions of everyday life. For instance, ‘Black Blizzard’ takes us to Norilsk, depicted as a dark, fantasy-like realm. ‘Kamilla’s Couriers’ captures the lives of delivery workers through voice messages and chats. And ‘Broken Lights’ examines the image of law enforcement in popular culture, drawing on the childhood memories of the filmmaker, a police officer’s son,” — Pavel Pugachev, programme curator from the National Competition.
Films:
- Ahurma, 2025, Andrey Soustin (Russia);
- DANET, 2024, Sergei Kofman (Russia);
- Cradle, 2025, Megen Tarba (Abkhazia);
- Kamilla’s Couriers, 2024, Katya Gosteva (Russia).
- Progress Report, 2025, Andrei Kovalchuk (Russia)
- A Song for the Young Voice, 2025, Maya Giter (Russia);
- Petenka Petr, 2024, Alla Kakhkharova (Russia);
- After Death, Ruins Remain, 2025, Nadya Zakharova (Russia);
- Reproduction, 2024, Ivan Morozov (Russia);
- Broken Lights, 2025, Konstantin Sidenko (Russia);
- The Black Blizzard, 2025, Mira Erkenova (Russia, Serbia);
- Ephemerality, 2025, Eliza Timofeeva (Russia).
OUT OF AUTOFOCUS: FILMS BY MIKHAIL BASOV
“The 35th Message to Man Film Festival proudly presents the first St. Petersburg retrospective of Mikhail Basov, a world-renowned video artist, long-time friend, participant, and jury member of our Festival. Mikhail Basov’s films defy conventional categories and canons, expanding our understanding of both cinematic language and the everyday reality from which they emerge. His method lies in the poetic and philosophical unveiling of chance, its remarkable unfolding in time and space. This is a rare and underexplored realm of subjective experimental ‘documentary’ filmmaking, requiring a uniquely attentive gaze. The ‘Out of Autofocus’ section, which Mikhail will personally introduce in St. Petersburg, is recommended to all who are passionate about cinema and contemporary art,” — Mikhail Zheleznikov, curator of the In Silico Experimental Film Competition.
Films:
- La Bagatelle, 2021, Mikhail Basov (Russia);
- Out of Autofocus, 2016, Mikhail Basov (Russia);
- Free Movements, 2013, Mikhail Basov (Russia);
- Short Circuits, 2020, Mikhail Basov (Russia);
- A Plastic Bottle’s Stair Dance, 2018, Mikhail Basov (Russia);
- The Spot of Time, 2025, Mikhail Basov (Russia);
- Film for Imaginary Music, 2014, Mikhail Basov, Natalia Basova (Russia)